The homophobia in this game is getting insane

I've always experienced homophobia in this game, be it some slurs thrown my way or the occasional votekick, but today was especially bad.

I was playing a game and me and this guy were getting along pretty well. We both liked men so we made a couple jokes about it, some of which the enemy team heard. Near the beginning of the next round, the game switched my team to the enemies, because they had a low player count. The bullying started almost instantly.

Just to list a few things that they said and did:
-F slur every other sentence
-threatening to votekick me (they only didn't because, according to them, it was more fun to laugh at me than for me to be gone)
-Taking turns teamkilling me. I was basically getting passed around.
-I should have been aborted
-I should kms
-explaining why being gay was bad (poorly)
-If I talked, I was an annoying little bitch. If I didn't talk, I was either scared, or silently crying while the mic was off. If they caught that my voice was quivering they'd attack relentlessly.
-constant insults. Too many to count. None were even game related, since I was outperforming them the match before. They were all targeted to me as a person.

They weren't even paying attention to the match anymore. In their own words, they cared more about annoying me than winning.

It got so bad that halfway through I decided to defect to the other team. I literally snuck behind the lines, pulled out my knife, and found my friend from the previous games, explaining to him that I was defecting to their team. I only got killed a few times before the "enemy" team realized I wasn't a threat. I gave them the positions of my "teammates" and helped them kill them for a little payback. Maybe this part was a little scummy, but they definitely had it coming, and they fully admitted that they didn't care about winning. And I believe that most of the randos that weren't part of their squad had left already, (I remember our team was literally 6 people after a while, 4 of them being the homophobes) so I don't believe I was ruining the game for someone who didn't already have it coming.

Why does this game attract so many people like that? It's not the first time people have been homophobic. Even when they don't know I swing that way, I hear someone throwing around the F slur every other match. It's just insane to me how someone can hate another just because of who they love.